Bury the Bones, No one will Know
by TotoDash
Summary: An artistic piece surrounding Toshiro Hitsugaya's death as a human before becoming the soul reaper we all know and love. He was very different as a child and I suppose he is the way he is because of his past - he couldn't run from it forever.


**BURY THE BONES, NO ONE WILL KNOW**

There was a story about the old well in the garden. They tell it to you when you buy the house as a welcome gift. It doesn't make you feel welcome. It's the kind of ghost story that scares young children and unnerves adults. The kind of story that stays with you for a long time after you hear it, especially if you live in that house – you never really get over hearing it, but it gets to a point where it doesn't bother you as much anymore.

The original owners of the house were a young family with money to spare. They'd drawn up plans and had it built on the plot of flattened land. Of course the well was there already, and they didn't think it necessary to close it off.

The husband was a successful businessman escaping for a quiet family life and the wife, his childhood sweetheart. They only had one small child, but he was enough for them and they were content. However, while their young son was the light of their lives, he looked a little different from the other children and that didn't sit well the other families in the area. The boy was fair haired and pale, short for his age but with eyes of an angel. The other children seemed not to have agreed and instead were weary of him, believing – as superstition does – that his abnormality was a mark of The Devil.

Not long after they moved in, the family moved away. But their son was not with them and they left without the joy they had brought to the sleepy area. They were silent and swift in their retreat and left no part of themselves behind aside from the house – the well in the garden closed with a lid and a rock.

Listening to rumours, some say the son fell down the well and drowned. Others say he was pushed. But I knew the truth, and I found a way to stop listening to the crying. He was right to cry though, because what happened was far darker than anything rumour had created over the years.

The parents were young and impressionable, foolish you could even stretch to say. Insane would be a better description. Cruel. Unhinged. Not quite right. But their son was all elbows and knees and crooked smiles and wild laughter. He didn't understand what would happen to him, and when it did happen, he would wonder why. He would spend the next century wondering why and never finding an answer.

The whispering must have gotten to them. The hushed nursing of an ember burning at the wick of their rationality. They were not nice inside of that house. There was no laughing inside of those walls. No smiles. No place for a child like him. Because they believed the hearsay after a while. Once they'd let it into their heads the whispering could never stop. It's no wonder they left in such a hurry.

Bruises bubbled and bloomed purple like flowers across his tender skin and negligence left him thin and alone. He stopped leaving the house, he hadn't the energy to move and his parent's paranoia would've earned him another mark to add to his collection anyway. They drugged him to make him sleep and the only food he received was laced to incapacitate him.

Two days before they left the area, desperate and furious, his mother had tried to bleed the evil out of him. Large blistering stains ran the length of the upstairs hallway as he'd run for his life – not quite fast enough and yet scared enough to believe he could.

He was dropped into the well unceremoniously, coughing and crying – not the energy to scream but giving it a go nevertheless – and left in darkness. They'd placed the lid, etched with the holy cross, to cover the well and the rock to hold it in place, all in the hopes that it would keep the evil within. It took another two days for him to die.

They cannot atone for what they did now, but I think that all he wanted was for someone to know was really happened. He needed someone to listen as he found his voice and to give him some kind of answers to the questions he held for so long. I could not tell him why his parents had hurt him as they had done, but I told him that it seemed to me they were afraid. Children understand fear. He was scared and he was alone for a long time, but it's okay now. He's not crying anymore.


End file.
